Marseille: Seen as potential champions as recently as Christmas, Marseille’s Ligue 1 meltdown has been so dramatic even second-bottom Metz fancy their chances for their showdown on Friday (10.30pm UAE).
Desperate for a win themselves, Metz coach Albert Cartier explained this week why he thought Marseille, on a run of four league defeats, were there for the taking again.
“They’re a team who attack and who are in real need of a win, us too, so against Marseille it’ll be an open game,” he explained.
Marseille travel north to Metz with just four games left of a season that is turning into a gut-wrenching disappointment for everyone at the club.
After their humiliating 5-3 home defeat in a wild match to relegation-threatened Lorient last week, Marseille’s club president spoke openly of a season gone to terrible waste.
“That looked like collective suicide,” OM president Vincent Labrune said.
“We need to find some self-respect, some pride, only this way can we win our last four games and avoid this season becoming a dreadful waste,” he added.
In the close season, Labrune recruited the Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa, whose peculiar coaching style and tendency to crank up the pressure saw the club top the table going into the winter break, and top it in swashbuckling style spearheaded by striker Andre-Pierre Gignac, who has 18 league goals this season.
Fourteen games later, however, they now trail Monaco in the third Champions League spot by five points, and tellingly are a full 11 behind Lyon, and a massive 14 adrift of leaders Paris Saint-Germain.
Marseille forward Dimitri Payet strenuously denied that Bielsa had lost the belief of the dressing room.
“I’m not having that. It’s thanks to him that we were in a position to win the title in the first place,” insisted the 28-year-old Bielsa stalwart, who has started 31 league games this term.
Instead the France international said Champions League football is still an objective.
“We can’t wait for this match. We want to show everyone this series of results was a kind of accident,” he explained.
Metz are in a far worse predicament than Marseille with four games left, three at home and one at Monaco, as they are eight points behind a safety spot.
